Jeremy Paxman: 'Our empire was an amazing thing'

We shouldn’t ignore our colonial history, says Jeremy Paxman, on
the eve of his BBC series.

The history of the British empire is full of amazing stories of adventure, of war, of greed and plunder, cruelty and courage, heroism and low cunning. It explains so much about who we are now, yet we increasingly pretend it never happened.

It’s nothing short of a scandal that this history is not taught in schools. It may be unfashionable to say so, but building, securing and running an empire was the biggest international preoccupation of this country for generations.

Imperial history explains both why Britain has a seat on the UN Security Council and the readiness of British prime ministers to commit British troops to overseas wars.

But it goes much further, too. The empire reshaped our education system and redefined how we think of ourselves. It was the trigger for much post-war immigration, and anything that changes the very genetic make-up of the population can hardly be dismissed as superficial.

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The problem is that there seems to have been a set of ready-to-wear prejudices handed out. According to the conventional view, there is only one way to look at the British empire: it was A Thoroughly Bad Thing. Sure, no one wants to be colonised and ruled by foreigners. But the picture is far more complicated than that. Of course there were many things that were bad. But there were others that were rather admirable.

The slave trade really was unforgivable. The 19th-century wars fought to force the Chinese to allow Scottish merchants to ship opium into the country were unconscionable (if you want an example of cant, just look at the justifications given by the men who ran the trade).

But are we also to condemn the campaign to abolish slavery? Once the British had become the first European nation to wake up to its cruelties, they enforced an international ban on the trade. Hundreds of thousands of people were saved from slavery by the Royal Navy.

And what was so wrong with attempts to map Africa, to ban sati (the custom of burying widows when their husbands died) in India, to lay roads and railways, and drains, to make trade follow internationally agreed laws, to try to create a system of incorruptible administration?

Of course, it is all undermined by distasteful assumptions about how the British were somehow superior to those they colonised (“Winning first prize in the lottery of life,” as Cecil Rhodes put it), which is probably why we prefer not to think about it. But we can take some consolation from the fact that while the British empire was motivated by self‑interest, it claimed to aspire to nobler ambitions than many other empires. (The unluckiest Africans got colonised by Belgians.) And when the time came to leave, the British largely departed when asked to do so – unlike the French in places like Algeria.

Filming for our new BBC One series, Empire, took us all over the world in pursuit of astonishing stories – from India and Hong Kong to Malawi and Sudan, Canada and Jamaica. In many places we found imperial amnesia to have less of a grip than it has in Britain. One of the more astonishing conversations I had was with an elderly Kikuyu lady who had been one of the leaders of the bloody Mau Mau uprising, which the British put down brutally. We were chatting outside her hut on the side of Mount Kenya when, to my astonishment, she suddenly started talking about how the British had created schools and hospitals and Kenya should accept and appreciate her colonial past.

From the black-gowned lawyers bustling around the courts in Calcutta to the old general watching Egyptians playing croquet at the old British military sports club in Cairo, there were plenty of others ready to embrace a more sophisticated recognition of what the empire was and did.

I suppose the greatest imperial spectacle in Britain was Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It’s appropriate that we look at the empire again in the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee. Victoria presided over more or less constant expansion, while our current queen has been there as the empire withered.

It now consists of a dozen-odd (some of them very odd) specks on the map, such as Pitcairn and Bermuda. In imperial terms, Queen Victoria was lucky, Elizabeth unlucky. The empire was always a monarchical thing, and our current queen is entitled to some of the credit for largely peaceful decolonisation and the creation and survival of that worthy institution, the Commonwealth, an institution most of the British don’t have the faintest idea about, but which countries like Mozambique and Rwanda – which weren’t part of the empire – have clamoured to join.

This empire we don’t like to talk about explains so much. When so many places on the map – Lake Victoria, Mount Everest – carry British names, it changes the way we regard the rest of the world. The empire helps to explain our problems with Europe and the fact that Scotland will soon stage a referendum on whether it wants to continue in a union with England.

Why the shock? Scotland only formally joined forces with England when its own attempts to found an empire – a crackpot scheme in central America – blew up in the country’s face and bankrupted it. Alex Salmond’s teenage years were spent watching countries tumbling out of the empire like crowds leaving a football match. Is it any wonder that he seeks a similar destiny for his own folk?

Perhaps if we acknowledged the vital role the empire played in our development, we’d understand ourselves a little better.